Accusations of Brutality Cast Harsh Light on Chinese Police

BEIJING — Accusations of police brutality are roiling China’s social media for a second time this month, since two men in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province in the northwest, said the police beat them harshly after one of them filmed a member of the Public Security Bureau kicking the other.

The episode’s online moniker — “Lanzhou buttocks” — belies its seriousness. Last week, another scandal swept through online conversations when a 29-year-old man, Lei Yang, died in the custody of the police in Changping, a suburb of Beijing.

The police said that Mr. Lei had been picked up at a foot massage parlor during a raid targeting prostitution. Mr. Lei’s wife is suing the police for intentional injury resulting in death, according to the Chinese news media in an article that has since been removed from some social media sites.

That case is being referred to as “Lei Yang’s foot massage,” Wang Zhongqiu, an author and management consultant, wrote on the social media platform Weibo.

“The phrases will become this year’s new sayings,” Mr. Wang predicted.

Both labels are evidence of the cynical humor that is common here in the face of widespread abuses by the police. The United Nations has said it is “seriously concerned” over torture in the criminal justice system and has called on China to address the problem.

The episode in Lanzhou reportedly took place on Monday, after the police intervened in a dispute over the use of a toilet near a building belonging to the Lanzhou University of Finance and Economics, according to The Paper, a Chinese online publication. By Thursday morning, the article had been taken down, although some details were still available on The Paper’s Weibo account.

One of the men, identified by The Paper as Xiao Peng, was a student at the university, it said.

A short video circulated widely on Weibo under the hashtag “Lanzhou People’s Police Violently Enforce the Law” appeared to show a police officer ordering a man, whom Xiao Peng said was a friend of his from high school, into a police car, after the dispute with another group of people grew verbally abusive. A man in a police uniform then kicked Xiao Peng’s friend as he got slowly into the car.

The video also shows the police demanding that Xiao Peng hand over his mobile phone after they realize he has filmed the kick. Xiao Peng refused, and both men were taken to the police station, where they were physically abused, they said. Photographs circulating on Weibo showed two men’s bare buttocks with deep bruising and torn skin.

On Weibo, many commentators compared Public Security Bureau officers to “bandits” and said the problem of police brutality was endemic.

“Are these the People’s Police?” wrote a person with the name Busy Inside and Out 0999. “They are simply the same as bandits!”

“My family is from Lanzhou and the police there are like a bunch of bandits. ‘The sky is high, and the emperor is far away.’ They think they’re such great cops, and there is no law. They stink all over. Evil,” Buenos_Alonsos wrote.

“There are no police in our country. Just thieves in uniforms,” Just Thinking If I Were Happy wrote.

One person questioned what the two men had been doing during the altercation: “What the university students were doing beforehand decides if this was violence or not,” SniperHa said.

The official Weibo account of the Yuzhong Public Security Bureau in Lanzhou said that two police officers at the local Peace Police Station had “stopped working” and that the events were being investigated by the police and by other branches of government.

On Tuesday, Wu Wencui, 28, Mr. Lei’s wife, sued the police for intentionally causing injury leading to death, abuse of power and assisting in fabricating evidence, according to a statement reportedly by Ms. Wu circulating online. Its veracity could not be independently verified as the family’s lawyer, Chen Youxi, declined to be interviewed.

The statement described horrid injuries to Mr. Lei’s body.

“On May 13, during the post-mortem examination, five family members saw with their own eyes the injuries all over his body,” the statement said. “What was fatal appeared to be his abnormally swollen testicles, and there were serious bruises to his forehead, scraped skin on his right hand, and bruises and bloodstains on his legs. Obviously, he died of external injury. The result of the post-mortem examination is bound to further prove this conclusion.”

According to Chinese law, the Beijing procuratorate must decide within a week whether to accept the case.